Rocío Cleveland was at a wedding on Saturday when she heard the news that something had happened to Donald Trump. He had fallen, clutching his ear, while giving remarks at a rally and it wasn’t yet clear if he was injured or even dead.

“It took a little bit for it to sink in,” said Cleveland, a conservative activist from Illinois who attended the Republican national convention this week. “I was speechless, I was crying, I was in tears.”

Trump had been tackled to the ground by a Secret Service detail after a gunman, perched on a nearby roof, opened fire on the crowd at a Trump rally. When the former US president rose, shaking his fist, blood dripping down his face – apparently only grazed by the would-be assassin’s bullet – the moment, for Cleveland, was euphoric.

“I think this tragic event that happened to President Trump, I think it will restore the faith in our country, as horrible as it may sound,” Cleveland said. “The world saw a miracle before their eyes.”

Cleveland’s perspective – that Trump’s survival was more than just luck – is shared widely by Christian believers in the Maga (Make America great again) movement who have seen the hand of God in Trump’s recent escape from serious harm at the hands of a gun-wielding 20-year-old shooter with no easily discernible motive.

It also bolsters Trump’s support in a key part of the Republican base – conservative evangelicals – that he and his team have been seeking to woo be deploying Christian imagery throughout his 2024 campaign.

The religious feeling, that Trump was saved in an act of divine intervention, quickly took hold in the Republican party after the shooting, with grassroots activists, internet personalities and powerful Republican lawmakers offering religious explanations for the near-miss.

“I have no doubt that God lowered a shield of protection over Donald Trump,” Ben Carson, Trump’s former secretary of housing and urban development, told the crowd on Tuesday night.

Carson said he had “watched with horror” as Trump was shot.

“And my thoughts immediately turned to the book of Isiah,” Carson said. “That says no weapon formed against you shall prosper.”

Others have also suggested divine intervention. One viral image that circulated on X in the days after the shooting showed how close the bullet came to striking Trump in the brain, rather than grazing his ear.

“God intervened,” a caption on the photo read. The image has been viewed almost 800,000 times.

Trump has not always been a favourite of the Christian right. A thrice-married man who has referred to the Eucharist as a “little cracker”, who was reportedly unable to name a single Bible verse and says he has never asked God for forgiveness, seemed an unlikely hero when he first ran for president.

But Trump’s selection of the pious Mike Pence as his running mate allayed concerns in 2016, and his nomination of conservative justices to the supreme court paved the way for the overturning of Roe v Wade – a huge victory for conservative Christians and one that appears to have sealed the bond between them and Trump.

While religious Trump supporters at the grassroots level seized on to a biblical interpretation of the shooting, influential figures in the Christian right have amplified it.

In a podcast episode titled Prophecy or Coincidence, Lance Wallnau, an influential pastor and self-described prophet, said that prayers for Trump had “worked” in saving the former president, and speculated that the shooter had been motivated by the left to commit an act of spiritual warfare.

In the episode, Wallnau referred to an apparent authority on the subject: Trump, who in the wake of the shooting, claimed on Truth Social that it was “God alone who prevented the unthinkable from happening”.

“We will FEAR NOT, but instead remain resilient in our Faith and Defiant in the face of Wickedness,” Trump wrote.

Again and again at the Republican national convention, prominent attendees and speakers echoed the sentiment.

“Let me start by giving thanks to God almighty for protecting president Trump, and for turning his head on Saturday as the shot was fired,” Ted Cruz, the Texas senator, said in his speech.

“Together we lift up in prayer all of our leaders for protection.”

Mike Lindell, the pillow salesman turned election conspiracy theorist and Trump ally, said during a podcast interview staged outside the convention center on Monday that an image of Trump on the ground, alive after the shooting, inspired in him a sense of religious awe.

“It’s like right there, you could feel the presence of God talking to us,” said Lindell, his voice wavering. “It’s gonna be OK. It’s gonna be OK.”

Others invoked darker forces. In his speech Tim Scott, the senator from South Carolina, claimed “the devil came to Pennsylvania holding a rifle”, while Marjorie Taylor Greene, the divisive Florida congresswoman, said “evil came for the man we admire and love so much”.

For Marlene Stuck, who traveled with congregants from her church in Stillwater, Oklahoma, to Milwaukee for the Republican national convention, the shooting was evidence of a fundamental spiritual truth.

“The word of God works,” said Stuck. “It saved his life.”

A toxic, racist, far-right response to Harmeet Dhillon’s Monday-night Sikh prayer at the Republican national convention is just one sign of the difficulties Donald Trump and Republicans have in selling a more diverse version of Trumpism to the party’s base.

Social media posts following Dhillon’s prayer indicated that some far-right Trumpists had been polarized by the sight of a non-Christian form of religious devotion on the convention stage in Milwaukee.

The barrage of hate she received from a segment of fellow Trump supporters may have been especially galling to Dhillon, whose earliest public prominence was as a civil rights lawyer defending turban-wearing Sikh men from post-9/11 racial profiling.

At the same time, Dhillon’s benediction showed how far the California lawyer and Republican national committeewoman has ascended in the Trump movement, where she is now a serious player.

In a decade, Dhillon has gone from a serial Bay Area political candidate to a well-remunerated member of Trump’s stable of top lawyers, an integral part of the post-Maga Republican party’s power structure, and a star of conservative media.

The case of Dhillon – whose firm has banked $8.25m from Maga Pacs for its assistance in Trump’s myriad legal battles – illustrates the tensions that may arise as Trump’s personal loyalties, and his attempts to expand his voter base, run up against the racial and religious prejudices of elements of his existing coalition.

The Guardian emailed Dhillon for comment on this reporting but received no response.

Prayer greeted with hate

Perhaps the earliest response to Dhillon’s prayer came from white nationalist and antisemitic activist Nick Fuentes, who said of the prayer in his live stream of the convention’s first night: “This is blasphemy. This is total blasphemy. Oh, fuck off. What a joke.”

In his post-stream summary, Fuentes, who leads the so-called “Groyper” movement under the slogan “Christ is King”, added that “Jesus Christ needs to be front and center,” and said: “Jesus saved Trump’s life on Saturday and no one wants to give him credit at this convention.”

Fuentes came to broader notoriety after he attended an infamous November 2022 dinner at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club with his then-employer Ye, the singer formerly known as Kanye West.

Fuentes’s acolytes followed suit. As the prayer was ending, an X account associated with the Fuentes-aligned “America First” website posted: “RNC promotes blasphemy and Sikh idolatry moments after Lutheran benediction.”

The far-right podcaster and internet personality Stew Peters took a similar line on X, posting: “Day 1 of the RNC was complete with satanic chants and multiple prayers to FALSE GODS.”

Peters is known for his conspiracy theories on Covid and vaccines, outspoken Christian nationalism, and antisemitic rhetoric. On X and other platforms, Peters has freely advocated antisemitic narratives including Holocaust denial.

The Gab founder, antisemite and self-proclaimed “Christian nationalist” Andrew Torba posted a screenshot of a supportive reply to a Dhillon post on her prayer from a Jewish American with the line: “Your Judeo-GOP, sir.”

Lauren Witzke, meanwhile, posted video of a part of Dhillon’s speech with the caption, “How about you get deported instead, you pagan blasphemer,” adding: “God saves our president and the RNC mocks him with this witchcraft.”

Witzke is a far-right political activist and one-time Republican Senate candidate who has promoted anti-LGBTQ+ positions, the “QAnon” conspiracy theory, and various antisemitic tropes, including that Jews control government, academia and the media, and that they have a divided loyalty between America and Israel.

Others, members of the Republican hard right and conservative media stars were similarly unimpressed, though less direct in criticizing Dhillon.

Matt Walsh, the host of The Matt Walsh Show on Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire platform, is known for inflammatory expressions of traditionalist Christian positions on cultural, religious and political issues, especially in relation to LGBTQ rights.

On Tuesday, he complained: “Trump has never had more momentum or good will and the RNC decided to use that to push a message of diversity and inclusivity rather than using it to advance anything resembling a conservative agenda.”

The lawyer and Blaze Media host Daniel Horowitz, notable for his fixation on immigration at the southern border, called Monday a “night of endless racial and ethnic pandering, union communism not just populism, and a porn star. This is going to be a long haul.”

Other convention speakers included the Teamsters union president, Sean O’Brien, and Amber Rose Levonchuck, known professionally as Amber Rose, who has appeared in hip-hop videos.

Carol M Swain posted that “I’m just say … The God of Abraham, Issac [sic], and Jacob would oppose interfaith chapels and the blending of worship across deities,” followed by an extended Bible quote.

Swain is a former professor at Princeton and Vanderbilt Universities and remains a conservative public intellectual. Swain, who is African American, attracted student protests in the years leading up to her retirement in 2017 over publicly stated views on Islam (“an absolute danger to us and our children”) and Black Lives Matter (which she said was “misleading black people”).

Maga maven, Maga money

Dhillon’s appearance thus appeared to divide a Maga movement which had come to see her as one of its tribunes.

That status ultimately derived from her litigation on behalf of leading Trump movement figures, including Trump himself, and media savvy lawsuits targeting movement bugbears and defending rightwing activists.

Through her firm Dhillon Law and the non-profit Center for American Liberty, where she serves as chief executive, Dhillon has brought suit on behalf of rightwing internet personalities including Andy Ngo and Rogan O’Handley, known online as “DC Draino”.

During the Covid pandemic, Dhillon pushed back on lockdowns and mask mandates, launching a flotilla of suits in California that named leading Democrats including Governor Gavin Newsom as defendants.

She parlayed all of this into brand-building media appearances, and became a regular on Fox News programs hosted by Laura Ingraham, Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson, until the latter was dropped by the network.

About the time of Carlson’s exit, Dhillon went from being his regular guest to a go-to lawyer, reportedly acting for him in the discrimination case that led up to his ouster, in a 2023 dispute with Fox itself , and against a Pac proposing to draft the former host for the 2024 presidential election.

Dhillon has acted directly for Trump in several high-profile cases. Her firm, Dhillon Law, represented Trump and acolytes including Michael Flynn and Sebastian Gorka in their interactions with Congress’s January 6 committee, to which Trump refused to testify. Her firm also represented Trump at the supreme court in January after courts in Maine and Colorado struck him from the state’s presidential ballots in 2023.

Advocacy for Trumpist causes has won Dhillon the prominence that booked her spot on the convention stage, as well as millions of dollars for her firm.

The most recent Federal Election Commission figures indicate that Dhillon Law has received over $10.4m in legal fees to date from Republican campaign committees.

All of those payments came after 2019, and the bulk – some $8.1m – has been paid since 2023, the year of her campaign to displace Ronna McDaniel as RNC chair. That campaign failed to oust McDaniel, but endeared her further to Trumpist conservatives who blamed McDaniel for Trump’s loss in 2020 and the GOP’s underperformance in the 2022 midterms.

A whopping $8.25m of the total has come from Trump-related Pacs, reportedly making Dhillon one of the highest-paid of Trump’s many lawyers.

Another big client is the Republican National Committee Dhillon sits on, which has paid the firm nearly $1.8m since 2019, despite Dhillon serving as RNC committeewoman for California since 2016, and has coincided with Dhillon’s ascent to national prominence and Trumpworld’s inner circle.

The culture-wars suits have also channeled money to Dhillon Law. The Guardian previously reported that the Center for American Liberty, where Dhillon is chief executive, had paid Dhillon Law $1.3m since its founding, making the firm its single biggest contractor.

At that time, Joan Harrington, a fellow at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at the Santa Clara University, called the arrangement a “conflict of interest”.

A filing subsequent to that reporting indicates that the non-profit paid Dhillon Law an additional $269.864 in 2022, bringing the total to over $1.5m.

Meanwhile, while the Monday night event tried to represent Trump supporters as more diverse than the largely white bloc who have hitherto voted for the president, the response to Dhillon’s prayer suggests that a swath of rightwing opinion will volubly resist that becoming a reality.

The gunman who attempted to shoot Donald Trump at a rally in Pennsylvania on Saturday carried out internet searches before the attack for images of both Trump and Joe Biden, as well as the dates of the current Republican national convention and next month’s Democratic national convention.

Top FBI and Secret Service officials told members of Congress on Wednesday that the initial investigation into the shooting had thrown up new information about the would-be assassin’s interests, but had brought agents no closer to finding a motive.

The suspect, named as Thomas Crooks, 20, was a registered Republican but had no known political ideology and had searched digitally for details of many public figures.

Those included a member of the British royal family, the New York Times reported. Other high-profile figures that were on the gunman’s radar included Christopher Wray, the FBI director, Merrick Garland, the US attorney general, and top congressional party leaders such as Mike Johnson, the Republican leader of the House, and Hakeem Jeffries, the Democratic minority leader.

Officials stressed to lawmakers that the significance of the searches found on the shooter’s phones and other digital devices was not clear.

The Secret Service is coming under mounting pressure over security arrangements at the rally site in Butler, Pennsylvania. In the course of the briefings with Congress, law enforcement officers disclosed that the gunman had been sighted and noted as suspicious about an hour before the shooting, but he had then disappeared.

About 19 minutes before shots rang out, the man was spotted again, according to the Republican senator from Utah, Mike Lee. According to the local police chief, Tom Knights, an officer from Butler Township had climbed up the side of the building from which the shooter struck, located about 150 metres from the stage where Trump was speaking.

A CNN report said that in a statement Knight disclosed that the officer had seen the shooter, who pointed his rifle at him.

“The officer was in a defenseless position and there was no way he could engage the actor while holding on to the roof edge. The officer let go and fell to the ground,” Knights said.

The new details have left some lawmakers angered, both at the apparent lack of police intervention despite sightings of the gunman, and at why Trump was allowed to take to the stage and address the crowd for several minutes before he was shot at. Kimberly Cheatle, the director of the embattled Secret Service, is likely to have to face such questions on Monday when she comes before the House oversight committee.

Two phones belonging to the gunman were found one at the rally site, on the roof of the warehouse beside his body after he was killed by Secret Service snipers, and the other during a search of his house in Bethel Park, Pennsylvania. Lawmakers were told that among his online searches the shooter had been looking for information on major depression disorder, prompting a new line of inquiry that he might have been struggling with mental health issues.

Security services across the Middle East fear the conflict in Gaza will allow Islamic State (IS) and al-Qaida to rebuild across the region, leading to a wave of terrorist plots in coming months and years.

Officials and analysts say there is already evidence of increased Islamic militant extremism in many places, although multiple factors are combining to cause the surge.

In recent months, an IS branch in the Sinai desert has become more lethal, rising attacks by the group in Syria have caused concern, and plots in Jordan have been thwarted.

Turkey made dozens of arrests last month as authorities sought to combat an increased threat from an IS affiliate with a strong presence there, and al-Qaida’s branch in Yemen (al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, AQAP) has made a concerted new effort to inspire followers to strike western, Israeli, Jewish and other targets.

Analysts and officials say the new activity is linked to the bloody conflict between Israel and Hamas, though widespread economic crisis, instability and continuing civil conflict are also playing an important role.

“Gaza is a source feeding terrorism and radicalisation across the Islamic world. There is a strong emotional reaction,” one informed regional source said. “We are just beginning to feel the heat.”

Tricia Bacon, a terrorism expert at the American University in Washington DC and a former US state department analyst, described the Gaza war as “a seminal cause that will radicalise the next generation of jihadis”.

“We may not see it immediately but we certainly will over the years to come. It has really heightened the terrorism threat,” she said.

The United Nations has published a series of reports drawing attention to efforts by major extremist groups to exploit the war in Gaza to attract new recruits and mobilise existing supporters – despite both al-Qaida and IS repeatedly condemning Hamas as “apostates” for decades.

In February, a UN report, drawing on contributions from intelligence agencies around the world, warned that at least one major al-Qaida affiliate was planning ambitious operations in the Middle East and elsewhere, and had “significantly reinvigorated its media strategy and content, capitalising on international events including … the 7 October attacks to incite lone actors globally”.

Regional officials underlined the effect of months of exposure, 24 hours a day, to images of suffering from Gaza on television and the internet, describing the conflict as a “push factor” encouraging extremist violence across the Middle East and elsewhere.

Mohammad Abu Rumman, an expert in jihadism at the Politics and Society institute in Amman, Jordan, said the region was facing a new wave of radicalisation “because of what is happening in Gaza”.

“This is a huge event and Arab countries are refusing to do anything and there is strong disappointment,” he said.

More than 38,000 people have died in the Israeli offensive launched into Gaza, according to Palestinian health officials. About half of those who have been fully identified are women and children. The offensive came after the attacks by Hamas into southern Israel in October in which militants killed 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and abducted 250 people.

In Iraq, where ISsis launched its caliphate in 2014, the threat of violent Islamic militancy appears contained but in Syria, it has launched more than 100 attacks on government forces and Kurdish-led fighters of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) over the past months, with violence peaking in March at levels not seen for several years.

“Daesh [IS] terrorist cells continue in their terrorist operations,” a SDF spokesman, Siamand Ali, said. “They are present on the ground and are working at levels higher than those of previous years.”

In one recent attack, seven Syrian soldiers died after being ambushed by IS in Raqqa province, in northern Syria, with 383 fighters from government forces and their proxy militias now killed since the beginning of the year, according to the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

Last month Jordanian security services were alerted to a plot in the country’s capital, Amman, when explosives detonated while being prepared by extremists in a poor neighbourhood of the city. Subsequent raids led to the detention of a network of predominantly young men apparently radicalised by IS propaganda.

Katrina Sammour, an independent analyst in Amman, said Islamic extremist groups were flooding the internet with material, including instructions for bomb-making. “They are capitalising on the anger in Jordan. It is mainly leaderless, but part of an attempt to destabilise the government, the leadership, the state,” she said.

Social and economic conditions in Jordan also play a role. Rumman said: “There is much precarity, a feeling that there is no political hope, very high inflation and a very high rate of youth unemployment. All this is very dangerous.”

The UN report described how “public communications by [IS] … since 7 October” had been focused on “capitalising on the situation in Gaza to mobilise potential lone actors to commit attacks”.

The media strategies followed by IS and al-Qaida differ, underlining continuing disagreement over priorities. IS has remained true to its belief that local regimes should be targeted first, while al-Qaida’s rhetoric still stresses a more global campaign against a “far enemy”, including the US and western powers.

Israel is geographically close and the Palestinian cause – along with the “liberation” of the Islamic holy places in Jerusalem – has long been central to the propaganda of both groups, although not a direct target of their attacks. Both groups have also repeatedly called for violence against Jewish communities around the world.

The UN report warned that that al-Qaida “could exploit the situation [in Gaza] to recover relevance and tap into popular dissent about the extent of civilian casualties, providing direction to those keen to act”.

Al-Qaida has suffered a series of setbacks over recent years, with its leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, killed in 2022 and internal divisions over strategy.

Sammour said al-Qaida was targeting young people. One case in Jordan had involved a high achieving 17-year-old from a well-to-do, moderate Muslim family in Amman who was recruited by extremists in just three months; another involved a 13-year-old.

“They are too young to even grow a beard. They are encouraged not to show overt signs of religiosity. It’s like grooming. There is an intent to isolate and control,” she said.

Joe Biden has reportedly become more open in recent days to hearing arguments that he should step aside as the Democratic presidential candidate, and former House speaker Nancy Pelosi has reportedly told Democratic colleagues that he could be convinced to leave the race soon.

The Washington Post reported that Pelosi has taken a prominent role in passing messages from House Democrats to the White House, relaying concerns that Biden is incapable of beating Donald Trump in November, and has said she thinks Biden is close to making a decision to end his campaign.

Pelosi has been widely reported as orchestrating the renewed pressure on Biden to give up his re-election bid, which has intensified in recent days after a brief pause following last Saturday’s failed assassination attempt on Trump, to which the president responded with a series of authoritative statements calling for calm.

Though he continues to insist he will be the party’s nominee in November, Biden has reportedly started asking questions about negative polling data and whether the vice-president, Kamala Harris, considered the favourite to replace him if were to withdraw, fares better.

The indications of a possible rethink come after Biden tested positive on Wednesday for Covid-19, forcing him to isolate for several days while curtailing a campaign visit to Nevada that had been part of a drive to show his candidacy was very much alive.

It also coincides with fresh polling data showing that he now trails Trump by two points in Virginia, a state he won by 10 points in 2020, and signals that key Democrats, including Barack Obama, now believe he should stand down.

The Emerson College Polling/Hill survey showed Trump ahead by 45% to 43%, within the margin of error but consistent with a spate of other polls showing that Biden’s support has fallen in swing states since his disastrous showing at last month’s debate in Atlanta.

Biden’s newfound receptivity to at least the possibility of stepping aside represents a shift from the position he adopted at a press conference at last week’s Nato summit in Washington, when he told journalists he would only drop out if polling data showed him “there’s no way you can win”.

“No one’s saying that,” he added.

His willingness to listen to opposing arguments comes after Chuck Schumer, the Senate majority leader, and Hakeem Jeffries, the Democratic leader in the House of Representatives, reportedly both told him that it would be in the country’s interest if he stepped aside, ABC reported.

Schumer described the report of his meeting with Biden at the president’s Delaware home last weekend as “idle speculation”, but, tellingly, did not deny its contents.

The Senate leader’s intervention has apparently been influential in delaying a move by the Democratic National Committee to stage an early electronic roll call of delegates that could have started next week and was aimed at locking in the nomination for Biden before next month’s party convention in Chicago. The roll call vote has been pushed by at least a week, giving forces opposed to him running more time to organise.

Pelosi also told Biden in a recent conversation that polls show he cannot beat Trump and that he could wreck the Democrats’ chances of recapturing the chamber in November, according to CNN.

Biden is said to have pushed back during the conversation, insisting – as he has in several Zoom sessions with other Democrats – that he had seen polling data showing he could win.

It is not known if Pelosi had called on the president to stand aside during the talk, which was said to have taken place in the past week.

Adam Schiff, the California congressman who on Tuesday became the latest elected Democrat to urge Biden to stand down, is known to be close to Pelosi.

“The speaker does not want to call on him to resign [as the Democratic nominee], but she will do everything in her power to make sure it happens,” Politico reported one Pelosi ally as saying.

A Washington Post report on Thursday suggested that Obama – for whom Biden served as vice-president – had told allies in recent days that Biden’s path to re-election had greatly diminished and that he needed to reconsider the viability of his campaign.

Obama has spoken to Biden just once since the 27 June debate but he and Pelosi have reportedly shared their concerns privately on the phone. The former president initially tweeted his support for Biden in the immediate aftermath of the debate.

Another key congressman, Jamie Raskin of Maryland – who played a leading role in the House committee that investigated the January 6 attack on the US Capitol – added his voice to the pressure with a four-page letter to Biden sent on 6 July comparing him to a tired baseball pitcher and pleading with him to consult with fellow Democrats over whether to continue his campaign, the New York Times reported.

“There is no shame in taking a well-deserved bow to the overflowing appreciation of the crowd when your arm is tired out, and there is real danger for the team in ignoring the statistics,” wrote Raskin, drawing a comparison with a Boston Red Sox pitcher, Pedro Martinez, whose tired state cost his team a place in the World Series in 2003.

In another ominous sign for Biden, Jeffrey Katzenberg, one of the president’s main advisers and a co-chairman of his campaign, has told him that donors have stopped giving money to his campaign.

A Biden adviser told the New York Times that the decision on whether to withdraw from the race boiled down to three factors – polling, money and which states were in play. All three were moving in the wrong direction for Biden, he said.

As renewed speculation about Biden’s thinking intensified on Thursday, his supporters continued to insist that the position was unchanged.

“When it comes to if he’s open or being receptive to any of that, look, the president has said it several times: he’s staying in this race,” Quentin Fulks, the Biden campaign deputy manager, told reporters on the sidelines of the Republican national convention in Milwaukee.

“Our campaign is not working through any scenarios where President Biden is not at the top of the ticket,” he added.

President Joe Biden’s son Hunter asked a federal judge on Thursday to dismiss tax and gun cases against him, citing a ruling in Florida this week that threw out a separate prosecution of Donald Trump.

The requests in federal court in Delaware and California underscore the potential ramifications of US district judge Aileen Cannon’s dismissal on Monday of the classified documents case against the former president and the possibility that it could unsettle the legal landscape surrounding the justice department’s special counsels.

Both Hunter Biden and Trump were prosecuted by special counsels appointed by the US attorney general, Merrick Garland. In dismissing the Trump case, Cannon ruled that the appointment of the special counsel who prosecuted Trump, Jack Smith, violated the constitution because he was appointed directly to the position by Garland instead of being nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate.

Smith’s team has said the justice department followed long-established precedent – for instance, the Trump-era appointment of special counsel Robert Mueller to investigate Russian election interference was upheld by courts – and has appealed Cannon’s dismissal to a federal appeals court in Atlanta.

In a pair of filings on Thursday, lawyers for Hunter Biden said the same logic should apply in his cases and should result in the dismissal of a pending tax prosecution in Los Angeles – currently set for trial in September – and a separate firearm case in Delaware, in which Hunter Biden was convicted in June of three felony charges.

Hunter Biden’s legal team had raised similar arguments before, albeit unsuccessfully, but they say there’s now good reason to reconsider them.

“Based on these new legal developments, Mr Biden moves to dismiss the indictment brought against him because the Special Counsel who initiated this prosecution was appointed in violation of the Appointments Clause as well,” Biden’s lawyers wrote, also citing an opinion this month by supreme court justice Clarence Thomas that questioned the propriety of a special counsel appointment.

“The Attorney General relied upon the exact same authority to appoint the Special Counsel in both the Trump and Biden matters, and both appointments are invalid for the same reason,” the lawyers added.

Smith and the special counsel who prosecuted Biden, David Weiss, are different in that Smith was hired from outside the justice department while Weiss was working as the US attorney in Delaware at the time of his appointment.

In her ruling, Cannon noted that a special counsel’s powers are “arguably broader than a traditional United States attorney, as he is permitted to exercise his investigatory powers across multiple districts within the same investigation”.

Biden’s lawyers said on Thursday that that’s exactly what happened in his case, as Weiss in his role as special counsel filed cases against Biden in California and Delaware and separately brought charges against a former FBI informant charged with lying about the Bidens.

“Mere US Attorneys do not have that power. Given that Congress requires a US Attorney to be nominated by the President and confirmed by the Senate, it makes no sense to assume that Congress would allow the Attorney General to unilaterally appoint someone as Special Counsel with equal or greater power than a US Attorney,” Biden’s lawyers wrote. “That is what has been attempted here.”

Joe Biden, who so far has defied calls to quit the presidential race from Democrats worried about his ability to beat Donald Trump, this week rolled out a catalogue of left-leaning campaign promises aimed at working-class and middle-class Americans. His renewed emphasis on core progressive priorities comes after leading Washington progressives, Senator Bernie Sanders and congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez threw their weight behind his beleaguered candidacy.

The moves reframe Biden’s campaign to focus on a suite of issues from US supreme court reform to ending medical debt. They come as Biden is reportedly more open to calls for him to step aside, but still has not left the race.

On Monday, Biden released a plan for the first 100 days of a second term at a campaign rally in Detroit, Michigan – a vital swing state that is home to a large segment of the Democrats’ working-class base.

The plan included strengthening social security and Medicare, bolstering voting rights and introducing legislation to restore women’s abortion rights previously enshrined in Roe v Wade, a historic ruling overturned by the supreme court two years ago.

Biden has also vowed to “end” medical debt, which burdens many poorer Americans, in an apparent extension of reforms his administration has already promised that would ban such debt from appearing in credit rating reports – potentially making it easier for millions of people to own a home or a car.

On Tuesday, the Washington Post reported that Biden is planning to introduce a package of reforms to the US supreme court, which has issued a series of pro-conservative rulings heavily influenced by rightwing justices appointed to the bench by Trump.

“I’m going to need your help on the supreme court, because I’m about to come out … with a major initiative on limiting the court,” Biden said in a Zoom call with the Democrats’ Congressional Progressive Caucus on Saturday, held to allay concerns over his candidacy.

Biden signalled his support for ending term limits – which, if enacted, could help shake up the rightwing stranglehold on the court – and for introducing a code of ethics to a court that has been rocked by scandals such as undeclared gifts by a billionaire to Justice Clarence Thomas.

Brad Sherman, a Democratic Congress member from California, told Axios “it was not a complete coincidence” that Biden dangled many of the policies the progressive caucus wants, considering where the president was now drawing support in the party.

“This is his base,” Sherman told Axios. “You see who has called upon him to move on, and who has called upon him to stay, and the progressive caucus lines up with those who have asked him to stay.”

The shifting of Biden’s campaign strategy along more leftwing lines follows the full-throated endorsement of, Sanders, the Vermont senator, who made the case for Biden on economic grounds in an opinion article for the New York Times.

“To win the election, the president … needs to propose and fight for a bold agenda that speaks to the needs of the vast majority of our people – the working families of this country, the people who have been left behind for far too long,” Sanders wrote.

“If Mr Biden and his supporters focus on these issues – and refuse to be divided and distracted – the president will rally working families to his side in the industrial Midwest swing states and elsewhere and win the November election.”

The support of Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez effectively threw Biden’s candidacy a lifeline. Biden also gained backing from Netroots Nation, an organisation of progressive activists, in Baltimore last weekend.

Keith Ellison, the Minnesota attorney general and a former chairman of the Democratic National Committee, told the Guardian at Netroots that backing Biden was essential to prevent a second Trump presidency.

“Quite honestly, what’s the alternative?” he added.

Greg Casar, a progressive Democratic congressman from Texas, also backed Biden, saying: “The fact is that we’ve had primaries and Biden is the nominee. The decision is entirely his to remain the nominee or not.“

“As long as he is, it’s important to rally the country around making sure that he is reelected.”

But not all those present agreed.

Aaron Regunberg – a former member of Congress from Rhode Island and a member of the Pass The Torch campaign, which is calling on Biden to stand aside – said: “This is an issue that does not have any ideological valence.”

The president has also wooed the Congressional Black and Hispanic Caucuses, via conversations on Zoom and speeches aimed at Black and Hispanic audiences, including an address to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in Las Vegas on Tuesday in which he called for a cap on annual rent increases at 5%.

Biden’s success in enlisting the support of prominent progressives in the Democratic party momentarily halted the mutiny, abetted by the temporary reprieve after Saturday’s failed assassination attempt on Trump. But on Wednesday, California congressman Adam Schiff became the 22nd member of Congress to urge him to stand aside for a younger candidate, and new reports on Thursday detailed how Chuck Schumer, the Senate majority leader, and Hakeem Jeffries, the Democratic leader in the House of Representatives, told Biden that it would be in the country’s interests if he stepped aside, according to ABC News. Eighty members of Congress have publicly pledged support for the 81-year-old Biden.

The new-found enthusiasm for Biden among progressives – a segment that has been bitterly critical of his support for Israel’s long military offensive in Gaza – may also reflect the fact most leftwing members of Congress represent electorally-safe districts. That represents a stark contrast with many of the centrists pleading with him to step aside partly because they fear voters’ concerns over his age and mental acuity are undermining their re-election efforts.

Even as Biden has gained support from some leading figures in the party’s left, other elements skeptical of his candidacy have resumed their offensive to persuade him to stand down, armed with new polling data that shows 15,000 voters in seven swing states supportive of an alternative candidate.

A polling memo from BlueLab Analytics and circulating among party officials showed a list of potential candidates that included Kamala Harris as well as several Democratic state governors all performing better than Biden, Politico reported. The strongest candidates were Josh Shapiro, the Pennsylvania governor; Gretchen Whitmer, the governor of Michigan; Wes Moore, the governor of Maryland; and Arizona senator Mark Kelly, who all out-performed Biden “by roughly 5 points across battleground states”.

The memo could further encourage those Democrats who favor Biden standing aside, and who were enraged by the Democratic National Committee (DNC)’s push to officially nominate Biden early, through an early electronic roll call of delegates starting in July that would lock Biden in well before next month’s party convention kicks off on 19 August in Chicago.

Several Democratic members of Congress had complained to the DNC that there was “no legal justification for this extraordinary and unprecedented action which would effectively accelerate the nomination process by nearly a month”.

On Wednesday the party changed tack, declaring that it would not start early voting in July and that the ostensible reason – an early deadline in Ohio – no longer applied after the state changed its law on 31 May.

Joe Biden has caught Covid-19 and cancelled a speaking engagement at the last minute, before he was due to address a conference in Las Vegas on Wednesday afternoon, the White House has confirmed.

The US president had developed symptoms, and just before he was going to address the UnidosUS annual conference in Nevada – after a long delay – the organization’s president and chief executive, Janet Murguía, told those gathered he would not be taking the podium.

Shortly afterwards, the White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, issued a statement saying, in part: “Earlier today following his first event in Las Vegas, President Biden tested positive for Covid-19.”

She added: “He is vaccinated and boosted and he is experiencing mild symptoms. He will be returning to Delaware where he will self-isolate and will continue to carry out all of his duties fully during that time. The White House will provide regular updates on the president’s status as he continues to carry out the full duties of the office while in isolation.”

The news came at a time when Biden is under severe pressure in his campaign for re-election, facing calls to step down as the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee because of his age and episodes of slipping acuity, most notably a dire debate performance against Donald Trump last month.

On Wednesday, the California congressman and Senate candidate Adam Schiff became the most high-profile Democratic representative to call for Biden to quit his campaign. His statement was followed by a report from Jonathan Karl of ABC News that Chuck Schumer, the Senate majority leader and a staunch ally of the president, had told Biden on Saturday that he should end his bid for another term in the White House.

After news that he had tested positive, Biden was seen walking very slowly up the steps of Air Force One in Las Vegas, preparing to return to Delaware, where he resides when he is not at the White House. He told reporters traveling with him that he felt good.

Jean-Pierre had earlier included with her statement from the White House a “note from the president’s doctor” saying that the president had a runny nose, a non-productive cough and “general malaise”, and would be taking the anti-viral drug Paxlovid.

The note continued that Biden “felt OK for his first event of the day, but given that he was not feeling better, point-of-care testing for Covid-19 was conducted, and the results were positive for the Covid-19 virus”.

It went on: “Given this, the president will be self-isolating in accordance with [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] guidance for symptomatic individuals. PCR confirmation testing will be pending. His symptoms remain mild … [He] has received his first dose of Paxlovid. He will be self-isolating at his home in Rehoboth [Delaware].”

Biden previously had Covid in 2022.

French lawmakers have re-elected a member of President Emmanuel Macron’s centrist bloc as president of parliament’s lower house, a possible breakthrough in attempts to form a majority amid deadlock.

French politics have been in gridlock after a snap election this month left the country without any clear path to forming a new government as Paris prepares to host the Olympic Games.

Lawmakers elected the president as parliament’s lower house, the national assembly, met for the first time since the elections.

With 220 votes in the third round, Yaël Braun-Pivet, 53, in a surprise move beat leftwing candidate André Chassaigne, who received 207 votes.

Seats in the 577-strong assembly are now divided between three similarly sized blocs.

A broad leftwing alliance called the New Popular Front (NFP), which unexpectedly topped the 7 July runoff but fell well short of an absolute majority, has more than 190 seats in the National Assembly. Macron’s camp has 164 lawmakers and the far-right National Rally 143.

Thursday’s election for speaker was a way to test the waters for possible alliances of convenience – although the secret ballot makes it impossible to say who exactly voted for which candidate in each of the three rounds.

The national assembly president mostly organises and moderates debate but has some key constitutional powers.

The fractious alliance of Socialists, Communists, Greens and the hard-left France Unbowed (LFI) wants to run the government, but has yet to agree on a prospective candidate for prime minister.

Anyone holding the executive job, second only to France’s president, must be able to survive a no confidence vote in parliament.

French lawmakers have re-elected a member of President Emmanuel Macron’s centrist bloc as president of parliament’s lower house, a possible breakthrough in attempts to form a majority amid deadlock.

French politics have been in gridlock after a snap election this month left the country without any clear path to forming a new government as Paris prepares to host the Olympic Games.

Lawmakers elected the president as parliament’s lower house, the national assembly, met for the first time since the elections.

With 220 votes in the third round, Yaël Braun-Pivet, 53, in a surprise move beat leftwing candidate André Chassaigne, who received 207 votes.

Seats in the 577-strong assembly are now divided between three similarly sized blocs.

A broad leftwing alliance called the New Popular Front (NFP), which unexpectedly topped the 7 July runoff but fell well short of an absolute majority, has more than 190 seats in the National Assembly. Macron’s camp has 164 lawmakers and the far-right National Rally 143.

Thursday’s election for speaker was a way to test the waters for possible alliances of convenience – although the secret ballot makes it impossible to say who exactly voted for which candidate in each of the three rounds.

The national assembly president mostly organises and moderates debate but has some key constitutional powers.

The fractious alliance of Socialists, Communists, Greens and the hard-left France Unbowed (LFI) wants to run the government, but has yet to agree on a prospective candidate for prime minister.

Anyone holding the executive job, second only to France’s president, must be able to survive a no confidence vote in parliament.

Bangladeshi students have set fire to the state broadcaster’s building a day after the prime minister, Sheikh Hasina, appeared on the network seeking to calm escalating clashes that had killed at least 39 people.

Hundreds of protesters demanding reform of civil service hiring rules clashed with riot police who had shot at them with rubber bullets on Thursday, chasing the retreating officers to BTV’s headquarters in the capital, Dhaka.

The incensed crowd then set ablaze the network’s reception building and dozens of vehicles parked outside, a BTV official told AFP.

The broadcaster said “many people” were trapped inside as the fire spread. Another official from the station later told AFP they had safely evacuated the building.

The government of Hasina, 76, has ordered schools and universities to close indefinitely as police step up efforts to bring a deteriorating law and order situation under control.

The premier appeared on the broadcaster’s station on Wednesday night to condemn the “murder” of protesters and vow that those found responsible would be punished regardless of their political affiliation. But violence worsened on the streets despite her appeal for calm as police again attempted to break up demonstrations with rubber bullets and teargas volleys.

At least 32 people were killed on Thursday in addition to seven killed earlier in the week, according to a tally of casualty figures from hospitals compiled by AFP. Hundreds more people were wounded. Police weaponry was the cause of at least two-thirds of those deaths, based on descriptions given to AFP.

“We’ve got seven dead here,” said an official at Uttara Crescent hospital in Dhaka, who asked not to be named for fear of reprisal. “The first two were students with rubber bullet injuries. The other five had gunshot injuries.”

Nearly 1,000 others had been treated at the hospital for injuries sustained during clashes with police, the official said, adding that many of those people had rubber bullet wounds.

Didar Malekin, of the online news outlet Dhaka Times, said one of his reporters, Mehedi Hasan, had been killed while covering clashes in Dhaka.

There was violence in several cities across Bangladesh throughout the day as riot police marched on protesters, who had begun another round of human blockades on roads and highways.

Helicopters rescued 60 police officers trapped on the roof of a campus building at Canadian University, the scene of some of Dhaka’s fiercest clashes on Thursday, the elite Rapid Action Battalion police force said.

Almost every day this month, people on marches have demanded an end to the quota system that reserves more than half of civil service posts for specific groups, including children of veterans from the 1971 liberation war against Pakistan.

Critics say the scheme benefits children of pro-government groups that back Hasina, who has ruled the country since 2009. She won her fourth consecutive election in January after a vote without genuine opposition. Her administration is accused by rights groups of capturing state institutions and stamping out dissent, including by the extrajudicial killing of opposition activists.

Mubashar Hasan, a Bangladesh expert at the University of Oslo, said the protests had grown into a wider expression of discontent with Hasina’s autocratic rule. “They are protesting against the repressive nature of the state. Protesters are questioning Hasina’s leadership, accusing her of clinging on to power by force. The students are in fact calling her a dictator,” Hasan said.

Bangladeshis reported widespread mobile internet outages around the country on Thursday, two days after internet providers cut off access to Facebook, the protest campaign’s key organising platform.

Reuters reported that telecommunications were disrupted on Friday as well, with Telephone calls from overseas mostly not getting connected and calls through the internet unable to be be completed. Websites of several Bangladesh-based newspapers were also not updating on Friday morning and their social media handles were not active.

The telecommunications minister, Zunaid Ahmed Palak, said the government had ordered the network to be cut off. He earlier said social media had been “weaponised as a tool to spread rumours, lies and disinformation”, forcing the government to restrict access.

Along with police crackdowns, demonstrators and students allied to the premier’s ruling Awami League party have also battled each other on the streets with bricks and bamboo rods.

With Agence France-Presse in Dhaka and Reuters news agency

The poliovirus has been found in sewage samples from Gaza putting thousands of people living in crowded displaced persons’ camps at risk of contracting the highly infectious disease that can cause deformities and paralysis.

The Gaza ministry said tests carried out with the UN children’s agency, Unicef, “showed the presence of poliovirus” in the territory that has endured a devastating Israeli military offensive since the 7 October Hamas attacks.

The Israeli health ministry said poliovirus type 2 was detected in Gaza sewage samples tested in an Israeli laboratory. It said the World Health Organization had made similar findings.

“The presence of poliovirus in wastewater that collects and flows between displacement camp tents and in inhabited areas because of the destruction of infrastructure marks a new health disaster,” the Gaza ministry said.

It highlighted “severe overcrowding” and “scarce water” that is becoming contaminated with sewage and the accumulation of rubbish. The ministry said Israel’s refusal to let hygiene supplies into Gaza “creates a suitable environment for the spread of different diseases”.

“The detection of poliovirus in wastewater threatens a real health disaster and places thousands of people at risk of contracting polio.”

UN agencies have been campaigning for four decades to eradicate polio, most often spread through sewage and contaminated water, but there has been a resurgence in recent years in Afghanistan and Pakistan and some isolated cases in Nigeria.

The ministry called for a halt to the Israeli offensive so that safe water can be brought in and sewage treatment can be restarted.

Authorities in the central Gaza town of Deir el-Balah said this week that wastewater treatment stations had been shut down because of a lack of fuel. They warned that roads “will be flooded by wastewater” and that 700,000 civilians, most of them displaced, would be put at risk of catching sewage-borne diseases.

Israel’s health ministry said the samples “raise concerns about the presence of the virus in this region”. It added that Israeli health authorities were “monitoring and evaluating necessary steps to prevent the risk of disease in Israel”.

Gun laws introduced by former prime minister Jacinda Ardern’s government in the wake of the deadly Christchurch mosque shootings in 2019 are at risk of being unwound, advocacy groups have warned, as New Zealand’s rightwing coalition moves forward with a comprehensive review of the measures spearheaded by a former gun lobbyist.

In June, the coalition government commenced a review of the newly created Firearms Registry and announced it would rewrite the law regulating gun use and ownership, fulfilling a commitment made in the coalition agreement between the centre-right National Party and libertarian ACT Party.

The creation of a firearms registry and a ban on military-style semi-automatic rifles were among the measures introduced by the Ardern government after the Christchurch terror attacks, in which an Australian white supremacist killed 51 Muslim worshippers at two inner-city mosques on 15 March 2019.

Despite receiving strong public support at the time, the changes attracted the ire of some gun owners, who claimed the laws demonised them without improving public safety.

Among the most vocal critics was Nicole McKee, a spokesperson for lobby group the Council of Licensed Firearms Users, whose concern over the issue motivated her to run for parliament in 2020 with the ACT Party. Now a minister in the coalition government, McKee is tasked with overseeing a root and branch rewrite of the country’s gun laws.

Gun control advocates fear this may signal a loosening of firearms controls.

“We’re really concerned this has the potential to undo all the changes that were made after the Christchurch terror attacks,” says Philippa Yasbek, co-founder of Gun Control NZ, an advocacy group founded after the mosque shootings.

“We know that before Nicole McKee was minister she was very keen to get rid of the registry and loosen access to semi automatic firearms.”

In November, shortly after the coalition agreement was reached, ACT leader David Seymour told New Zealand media that those with an approved purpose who have gone through certain checks should be able to access military-style semi-automatic rifles.

However, prime minister Christopher Luxon has said there would be “no new guns added into New Zealand” as a result of the reforms. “We are going to rewrite the Arms Act because it’s an outdated piece of legislation, it’s an old piece of legislation,” Luxon told Radio New Zealand in March.

In response to questions, McKee declined to say whether the new law would be more or less permissive in terms of access to firearms than the current law, or would increase the number of firearms in circulation.

“I am not making any assumptions about the outcomes. I am looking forward to upcoming consultation to hear from the New Zealand public and experts,” McKee said in a written statement to the Guardian.

“Unlike some of the rushed changes made by the Ardern government, where consultation was negligible – in one case amounting to three days – we will be listening to everyone.

“This reform is about providing greater public safety outcomes – through simple and effective regulation. It is about finding the right balance for our country and once again leading the world with enduring legislation.”

Alexander Gillespie, a professor of international law at Waikato University, says New Zealand’s firearms laws before 2019 reflected “poor practice” by international standards and were “part of the reason the atrocity was able to unfold”.

“It was possible to game the system with great ease,” says Gillespie, referring to the “readily available access to semi automatic firearms”, while the lack of a firearms registry put New Zealand out of step with comparable countries such as Australia and the United Kingdom.

After the Ardern-era reforms, New Zealand’s laws are now “pretty close to good practice”, says Gillespie, although it is too soon to know what impact they have had.

“You’re looking at only a five year period. It’s very difficult to show a statistical relationship between what happened with the Ardern government and a reduced case of extremism and violence.”

Gun laws introduced by former prime minister Jacinda Ardern’s government in the wake of the deadly Christchurch mosque shootings in 2019 are at risk of being unwound, advocacy groups have warned, as New Zealand’s rightwing coalition moves forward with a comprehensive review of the measures spearheaded by a former gun lobbyist.

In June, the coalition government commenced a review of the newly created Firearms Registry and announced it would rewrite the law regulating gun use and ownership, fulfilling a commitment made in the coalition agreement between the centre-right National Party and libertarian ACT Party.

The creation of a firearms registry and a ban on military-style semi-automatic rifles were among the measures introduced by the Ardern government after the Christchurch terror attacks, in which an Australian white supremacist killed 51 Muslim worshippers at two inner-city mosques on 15 March 2019.

Despite receiving strong public support at the time, the changes attracted the ire of some gun owners, who claimed the laws demonised them without improving public safety.

Among the most vocal critics was Nicole McKee, a spokesperson for lobby group the Council of Licensed Firearms Users, whose concern over the issue motivated her to run for parliament in 2020 with the ACT Party. Now a minister in the coalition government, McKee is tasked with overseeing a root and branch rewrite of the country’s gun laws.

Gun control advocates fear this may signal a loosening of firearms controls.

“We’re really concerned this has the potential to undo all the changes that were made after the Christchurch terror attacks,” says Philippa Yasbek, co-founder of Gun Control NZ, an advocacy group founded after the mosque shootings.

“We know that before Nicole McKee was minister she was very keen to get rid of the registry and loosen access to semi automatic firearms.”

In November, shortly after the coalition agreement was reached, ACT leader David Seymour told New Zealand media that those with an approved purpose who have gone through certain checks should be able to access military-style semi-automatic rifles.

However, prime minister Christopher Luxon has said there would be “no new guns added into New Zealand” as a result of the reforms. “We are going to rewrite the Arms Act because it’s an outdated piece of legislation, it’s an old piece of legislation,” Luxon told Radio New Zealand in March.

In response to questions, McKee declined to say whether the new law would be more or less permissive in terms of access to firearms than the current law, or would increase the number of firearms in circulation.

“I am not making any assumptions about the outcomes. I am looking forward to upcoming consultation to hear from the New Zealand public and experts,” McKee said in a written statement to the Guardian.

“Unlike some of the rushed changes made by the Ardern government, where consultation was negligible – in one case amounting to three days – we will be listening to everyone.

“This reform is about providing greater public safety outcomes – through simple and effective regulation. It is about finding the right balance for our country and once again leading the world with enduring legislation.”

Alexander Gillespie, a professor of international law at Waikato University, says New Zealand’s firearms laws before 2019 reflected “poor practice” by international standards and were “part of the reason the atrocity was able to unfold”.

“It was possible to game the system with great ease,” says Gillespie, referring to the “readily available access to semi automatic firearms”, while the lack of a firearms registry put New Zealand out of step with comparable countries such as Australia and the United Kingdom.

After the Ardern-era reforms, New Zealand’s laws are now “pretty close to good practice”, says Gillespie, although it is too soon to know what impact they have had.

“You’re looking at only a five year period. It’s very difficult to show a statistical relationship between what happened with the Ardern government and a reduced case of extremism and violence.”

• Ukrainian aerial and maritime drones struck Russian military targets on the illegally occupied Crimean peninsula on Thursday, a defence source in Kyiv said. An operation by the navy and the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) damaged or disabled a command centre and an ammunition depot among other facilities at Lake Donuzlav in western Crimea, the source told Agence France-Presse. The Russian military said it brought down 33 Ukrainian aerial drones over Crimea and 10 naval drones heading for the peninsula. The figures were not independently verified and Russian officials routinely claim after attacks that most or all threats were eliminated, regardless of the outcome.

• Ukraine’s army confirmed it had pulled out from the village of Urozhaine in the eastern Donetsk region. The village was reduced to rubble, which “made it impossible to hold the positions there”, Nazar Voloshyn, a spokesperson for ground forces, told the Associated Press. Russia’s defence ministry announced several days ago that its army had retaken Urozhaine.

• Russian forces killed five civilians on Thursday in the Donetsk region, regional prosecutors said. “An 85-year-old local resident died as a result of a hit to a residential building. They tried to save his wife but she died during emergency treatment.” Russia forces also attacked Grodivka, killing three women, aged 26, 32 and 77, prosecutors said.

• Volodymyr Zelenskiy, attending the European Political Community summit in Oxfordshire, accused the Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán, of betraying fellow European leaders to Vladimir Putin after Orbán’s recent “peace mission” to Moscow, write Lisa O’Carroll and Kiran Stacey. Zelenskiy told the session: “[Putin] may try to approach you, or go to some of your partners individually, trying to tempt or pressure you to blackmail you so that one of you betrays the rest. We keep our unity.”

• Zelenskiy used his speech to urge Europe’s leaders to provide more air defences and weaponry for Ukraine and not place limits on their use – for example, the UK has provided Ukraine with Storm Shadow missiles, but reportedly is not allowing their use against targets in Russian territory. “We should not fear these capabilities,” Zelenskiy said. “The more effective our air defences, the more helpless Putin will be. The fewer restrictions we have on the use of effective weapons, the more Russia will seek peace.”

• Keir Starmer, the British prime minister, introduced Zelenskiy on Thursday. “Every day Ukraine fights to protect not just the Ukrainian people, but the European people – a continent where our belief in freedom, democracy and the rule of law was hard won, that wants to live in peace,” he said, adding allies “will stand with you for as long as it takes”. Zelenskiy will address the UK’s new cabinet on Friday about the battlefield situation in the war with Russia.

• Sweden’s power grid authority will send 13 large diesel-powered backup generators to Ukraine. “The generators will, for instance, be able to supply a hospital with electricity or be used within the power grid to better handle outages,” said Sweden’s energy minister, Ebba Busch. Russian attacks have halved Ukraine’s electricity generation capacity compared with one year ago.

• Donald Trump’s assertion he could quickly end the Ukraine war should be viewed realistically, given that when he was president he promised a Middle East peace breakthrough but failed to achieve it, said Maria Zakharova, Russian foreign ministry spokesperson.

Israel’s extremist national security minister has visited the holiest Muslim site in Jerusalem, recording a video saying he went to pray, in a provocative move as he seeks to disrupt ceasefire talks.

Itamar Ben-Gvir, an ultranationalist and champion of the settler movement, recorded footage at al-Aqsa mosque compound, also known as the Temple Mount, a site holy to Muslims and Jews.

In the shadow of the Dome of the Rock, Ben-Gvir spoke with his personal security visible behind him and an armed member of the Israeli border police patrolling nearby. He said he had come to the compound to pray for the return of Israeli hostages held by Palestinian militants in Gaza “but without a reckless deal, without surrendering”.

He added that he was “praying and working hard” for the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, to resist international pressure to sign a ceasefire deal and instead continue a military campaign in Gaza. Israeli attacks have killed more that 38,000 people in the strip since the attack by Hamas militants on 7 October last year.

His visit immediately drew condemnation from the Jordanian foreign ministry, a powerful force within the body administering the holy Islamic compound, which called it “a provocative step” and a violation undertaken by “the extremist Israeli government”.

The Israeli interior minister, Moshe Arbel, of the Jewish religious party Shas, chastised Ben-Gvir for entering the area. “One day, the era of provocations by Ben-Gvir will pass,” Arbel said.

John Kirby, a spokesperson for the US National Security Council, said without naming Ben-Gvir that the White House was “concerned about rhetoric and actions that are counterproductive to peace and security in the West Bank”.

He said: “The president has been pretty strident about his concerns over, for instance, the settler violence and we have also expressed our concerns about activities and rhetoric by certain Israeli leaders. And those concerns remain valid, and what we would continue to urge our Israeli counterparts to do is nothing that inflames passions or could lead to or encourage violent activity one way or the other.”

Biden is expected to speak with Netanyahu next week despite his recent Covid diagnosis, as part of a controversial visit by the Israeli leader to the US, where Netanyahu is expected to also address a joint session of Congress, Kirby said. He said the vice-president, Kamala Harris, who has been suggested as a potential replacement for Biden if he drops out of the election race, was also expected to meet Netanyahu.

Ben-Gvir last visited the site in May in order to state his objection to countries including Spain, Norway and Ireland recognising a Palestinian state. His latest visit is seen as additionally provoking, ahead of Netanyahu’s forthcoming visit to Washington and in the midst of negotiations for a ceasefire in Gaza.

Al-Aqsa mosque compound is a highly sensitive site, where efforts by a faction of extremist Jewish settlers to pray there are seen as a violation by Muslim worshippers and observers, symbolising efforts to bring the mosque compound and the divided holy city of Jerusalem under total Israeli control.

Visits by Israeli ministers to the site or incursions by Israeli security forces have proved to be a trigger for protests and violence in the past, notably a visit in 2000 by Ariel Sharon that fuelled an uprising known as the second intifada.

Netanyahu summed up the status quo at al-Aqsa in 2015, saying: “Muslims pray on the Temple Mount, non-Muslims visit.”

Daniel Seidemann, an Israeli lawyer and expert on the politics of Jerusalem, said the rise of a movement of extremist Israeli settlers had changed the fragile balance at the holy site.

“It’s clear in recent years that the status quo has been eroded significantly. First there were daily Jewish prayers that began with people whispering and mumbling,” he said. “Today there are groups escorted by the police, which is a major source of tension although these parties have kept a low profile.

“Over the last 20 years, the events and discourse in Jerusalem have been run by religious pyromaniacs. This conflict did not become a religious war, but the people driving events are fighting one.”

He said Ben-Gvir’s visit was intended as a symbol of “nationalistic triumphalism”, to flex his muscle and gesture at an Israeli victory in Gaza as well as control of key sites long claimed by Palestinians.

Several hardline ministers in Netanyahu’s government, including Ben-Gvir, have attempted to dissuade the prime minister from agreeing to a ceasefire deal, warning they would leave the ruling coalition.

Victims who perished in Pompeii after the devastating AD79 eruption of Mount Vesuvius may have been killed by a simultaneous earthquake, research has suggested.

Scholars have debated for decades whether seismic activity occurred during the eruption of Vesuvius in southern Italy nearly 2,000 years ago, and not just before it, as reported by Pliny the Younger in his letters.

The article published on Thursday in the academic journal Frontiers in Earth Science took a new look at the now world-famous archaeological site, arguing that one or more concurrent earthquakes were “a contributing cause of building collapse and death of the inhabitants”.

“Our conclusions suggest that the effects of the collapse of buildings triggered by syn-eruptive seismicity (seismic activity at the time of an eruption) should be regarded as an additional cause of death in the ancient Pompeii,” it said.

Archaeologists estimate that 15 to 20% of Pompeii’s population died in the eruption, mostly from thermal shock as a giant cloud of gases and ash covered the city.

Volcanic ash then buried the Roman city, perfectly preserving the homes, public buildings, objects and even the people until its discovery in the late 16th century.

In May 2023, archaeologists uncovered the skeletons of two men who appeared to have been killed not by heat and clouds of fiery gas and ash but from trauma due to collapsed walls – providing precious new data.

One of the victims was discovered with his left hand raised, as if to protect his head.

“It is worth noting that such traumas are analogous to those of individuals involved in modern earthquakes,” wrote the authors, who determined that the collapsed walls were not due to falling stones and debris but to seismic activity.

“In a broader view that takes into account the whole city, we consider, as a working hypothesis, that the casualties caused by seismically triggered building failures may not be limited to the two individuals,” the authors wrote.

The intersection of phenomena from both volcanic and seismic activity requires a multidisciplinary approach, the study argued, with the collaboration of archaeologists and earth scientists.

Bob Newhart, the revered US comedian and star of two classic sitcoms known for his deadpan delivery, died on Thursday at the age of 94.

The Chicago native and titular star of game-changing sitcoms The Bob Newhart Show and Newhart in the 1970s and 80s, died at his home in Los Angeles after a period of short illnesses, his publicist Jerry Digney confirmed in a statement.

A former accountant who began moonlighting in comedy venues, Newhart first rose to fame in the 1960s for his observational humor and droll delivery. His breakthrough album, The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart, recorded over several days in Houston before Newhart had any stand-up experience, netted him Grammys for best new artist and album of the year in 1961.

“In 1959, I gave myself a year to make it in comedy; it was back to accounting if comedy didn’t work out,” he once said, according to Digney’s statement. Newhart was 30 years old and years into a career as a Chicago accountant when the album went No 1 on the sales charts, the first comedy album to do so.

The comic went on to dominate the sitcom landscape for nearly two decades with two beloved TV shows, first with The Bob Newhart Show, which aired on CBS from 1972 until 1978. The show, in which Newhart starred as a befuddled psychologist in Chicago, became one of the most popular sitcoms of all time.

The follow-up, Newhart, starred Newhart and Mary Frann as an author and his wife who open a rural inn in Vermont. It ran from 1982 until 1990 and featured one of the more admired finales in TV history, in which Newhart’s character wakes up next to his wife from the Bob Newhart Show, played by Suzanne Pleshette, suggesting the entire second series was a dream.

Newhart was nominated for several Emmys for his TV work, though he didn’t win one until 2013, for guest-starring as Arthur Jeffries on CBS’s The Big Bang Theory. He is also famous to younger audiences as Papa Elf, the adoptive father to Will Ferrell’s Buddy, in the 2003 holiday comedy Elf.

Mayim Bialik, who starred on The Big Bang Theory with Newhart said in a statement : “As a child, the Bob Newhart Show provided countless hours of enjoyment for me – it constituted some of my earliest training in the art of sitcom. When I got to work with alongside him on TBBT, it was absolutely a dream come true. He was effortlessly professional, poised, hilarious and incredibly approachable. Working with Bob was working in the presence of a true comedy legend.”

Born on 5 September 1929 in Oak Park, Illinois, George Robert Newhart ushered in a new style of comedy in the 1960s, breaking from the mold of vaudeville and Borscht Belt routines for bits based in observation and psychology. His performance style incorporated stammering, deadpan delivery and quietly subversive material that appealed widely; his debut was the first comedy album to top the Billboard charts, and his first two albums held the top two spots simultaneously, a feat not accomplished again until Guns N’ Roses in 1991.

In his later years, Newhart took on a number of feature film roles, including In & Out and Legally Blonde 2: Red, White & Blonde. He also continued performing standup into his 70s, giving about 30 shows a year as of 2006.

“Comedy has given me a wonderful life,” he said. “When I first started out in standup, I just remember the sound of laughter. It’s one of the great sounds of the world.”

The comedy great Carol Burnett posted on social media: “I had the great pleasure of working with Bob and being his friend. He was as kind and nice as he was funny. He will be missed.” The two worked together on The Carol Burnett Show.

Among others paying tribute to Newhart were Judd Apatow, Jamie Lee Curtis and Bill Prady. Apatow, who co-directed Bob and Don: A Love Story about the lifelong friendship of Newhart and Don Rickles, posted on social media: “I was so lucky to get to spend that time with my hero. His brilliant comedy and gentle spirit made everyone he encountered so happy.”

Prady reflected on his importance to comedy: “Hard to explain how important Bob Newhart was to every comedian and comedy writer who came after him.”

Curtis wrote in a tribute on her Instagram, “They will be laughing wherever people go when they leave us. God, he was funny! Bob Newhart. You will be missed!”

The comedian was inducted into the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences’ Hall of Fame in 1993, and won the second-ever Mark Twain prize for humor, presented by the Kennedy Center, in 2002. In 2007, The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart was chosen as one of 25 entries for the Library of Congress’s National Recording Registry.

Newhart’s wife, Ginnie, whom he married in 1963, died last year at the age of 82. He is survived by his four children, Robert, Timothy, Courtney and Jennifer, and 10 grandchildren.